This project focused on the development of an app for mobile phones. At the start of the project, we were allowed to choose between Apple and Android systems to develop for, as these two systems have different tools to use in the development process. I decided to opt for the Android route as the majority of mobile users have an Android device.

After some initial lessons in our programming for Android systems, we were tasked with a short test. In this test, we were asked to code some interactive elements for an application. This included buttons, spinners, text fields and password fields. This test was not overly hard and I achieved 95% on this test.

After this test, we were asked to group up with a partner for the main project. For the main project, we had three choices of programs to develop for. I and my partner decided to go for the program that could be used in a lecture to allow students to give feedback or ask questions in a lecture. This also meant we had to allow different lecturers to set up different lectures on the app at the same time, which also meant that users would have to choose which to join or be confined within ones they were allowed to join.

We had plans to implement many features for the project, but with our lack of Android experience found ourselves running out of time before we were able to complete all of them.

One of the main elements of this program was to create a traffic light system that the students could use to inform the lecturer on whether they were going to fast for the students or whether the content was good and at a good pace (i.e. green for good, red for I need help). This was designed with a

After setting up the layout of each page (logging in (as lecturer or student), setting up a lecture, joining lectures list, lecturers lecture screen and the students’ lecture screen) we looked at creating our database. As we had never created a database before, which put us at a massive disadvantage, we looked at using a singleton to act as a database. This allowed us to keep information between pages on the mobile phone and send it at any time to the server which was provided by the lecturer.

We stored the student’s response (i.e. green, amber, red) on the client phone and the server and when they would make another response were able to take the previous response from the server and add the new response. Programming the singleton and server interaction in this way allowed us to skip creating a database.

Whilst the server was provided by the lecturer we had to create the code we were going to put on there to interact with our program on the mobile phones. Information sent to the server is packaged in a JSON object and can be unwrapped inside of it to allow the code to interact with different events that have happened on the mobile device. After this is completed any response to the device is then packaged into a JSON object again before being delivered to the device.

We also added an ask a question feature that allows students to ask the lecturer a question anonymously. In terms of device to server communication, this works in the same way the traffic light system does.

To get a more in-depth explanation of the application please view these documents – SOFT254Report

No video or images available due to lack of Mobile screen recording and the inability to find a suitable version of Android Studio for emulation (unable to find compatible version of Android studio).

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